Nothing Gold Can Stay

BANGKOK—Once again I’ve gone and gotten way behind here, as we’ve been mighty busy the last couple of weeks and have burned up a lot of miles. But I’ll do my best to get caught up. Let’s see, my last dispatch ended with us preparing to board an overnight train from Bangkok up north to Nong Khai, a provincial Thai city on the banks of the Mekong River just across the border from Laos.

We had high hopes for Nong Khai, but as is sometimes the case when traveling, we were a bit disappointed with it. Not that it’s an unpleasant place. There just ain’t much there. Our guidebook referred to it as a sleepy river town, but I think a more appropriate word would be simply asleep. In fact I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a more somnolent place. So after a couple days milling about we decided to change direction and spend the rest our time before returning to Bangkok across the river in Laos.

In spite of recent changes, the Communist Party still loves its propaganda.

We’ve been to Laos on two prior occasions and it never fails to delight. There’s just something about this beguiling little country that puts you in a good mood, which is strange in a way, considering its brief but turbulent history.

The present day country of Laos is something of a European invention. The Lao people are an ancient ethnic group, one of dozens that make up the greater population of modern Southeast Asia, but other than a brief flowering of nationhood under the Lan Xang empire, which reached its apogee in the 17th Century before falling to Siamese control, the Lao people lived for centuries under the waxing and waning rule of various neighboring powers. This finally changed in 1893 when France bullied Siam (modern day Thailand) into handing over all its territories east of the Mekong River. And thus, modern day Laos was born, but not before the French added a silent “S” to the end of its name.

For the next sixty years Laos languished more or less peacefully as a member of the French controlled colonial triumvirate of Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), not counting a brief occupation by the Japanese during WWII. France returned after the war to reclaim its control over Indochina, but the die was cast, and France’s colonial days were numbered. Finally in 1953, a year before the Vietnamese thoroughly whipped the French at Dien Bien Phu and sent them packing, Laos won its full independence from the yoke of French colonialism.

Another dreamy Mekong sunset

But the euphoria of freedom was short lived as the country, following a path similar to neighboring Vietnam and Cambodia, quickly spiraled into chaos fueled by an internal power struggle between the Communist-led Pathet Lao and the American-supported right-wing elite. Over the course of the next twenty years the country was all but paralyzed by strife. From 1965 to 1973, as a result of the Vietnam War spilling over its borders, Laos gained the dubious distinction of being one of the most heavily bombed and mined countries on earth. In 1975 the Communists took decisive control of the country and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic was born. Realizing early on, however, the shortcomings of Soviet-style economic policies, Laos began slowly opening up to free enterprise and foreign investment in the mid 1980s while remaining staunchly Communist. From 1975 the United States had a trade embargo on Laos, more or less rendering it a pariah state, but this finally ended in 2004 when Laos regained “Normal Trade Relations” with the U.S. Since then Laos has been on a rapid course of economic development, propelled more by trade with its Southeast Asian neighbors and China than by its much improved relations with the U.S.

The capital of Laos, Vientiane, sits right across the Mekong from Nong Khai, so we decided to make it our first stop. We first visited Vientiane in March 2008 and instantly fell in love with it. Compared to other Asian capitals, Vientiane is tiny, with a population of around 250,000. At the time of our first visit the city was like a time warp, lazily slumbering in a backwater dreamworld. The pace of life was languid and unhurried, traffic was scant, and the downtown cityscape along the river was an intoxicating admixture of early 20th Century French Colonial, 1930s Art Deco, and brooding monolithic Soviet-era architecture, all dripping with atmosphere in that perfect state of decay somewhere between prior splendor and imminent collapse. About the only thing to do in Vientiane at that time was soak up the romantic vibe of bygone days around town before heading to one of the dozens of ramshackle bars set up along the riverfront promenade in the evening to lounge on a wicker mat and sip a cold bottle of Beerlao under an awe-inspiring hazy pink Mekong sunset.

Boy, how things can change in only five years. Upon arriving in Vientiane we were dumbfounded by how different the city now feels. Driving into town from the border we passed half a dozen or more heavy equipment dealerships in front of which sat rows of gleaming new Kobelco and Volvo excavators and road graders poised to begin new infrastructure projects. A mile or so further into town we passed the hulking new U.S. Embassy, still in the early stages of construction. All around the center of town construction cranes loom over new hotels and multistory condos going up on the bulldozed sites of once splendid colonial mansions and former lichen-covered shophouses.

We had hoped to bed down at the same hotel we stayed at last time—a dusty and slightly creepy old 1950s holdover in that delicious state of imagination-inspiring deterioration, like something out of The Shining—but found in its place a trendy boutique hotel much less appealing than its forebear and far out of our price range. And the scruffy old bars along the weedy riverfront? Gone, replaced by a newly constructed city park replete with winding pedestrian paths, exercise equipment and a tawdry Chinese Temple donated as a gift—according to a banner strung across the entrance—by the Chinese government.

And then there’s the traffic. Five years ago what traffic existed was composed largely of battered city buses and tuk-tuks intermixed with a menagerie of old sedans and the occasional luxury SUV. Nowadays the streets are filled with shiny new Toyota Hilux pickups, Isuzu SUV’s and Honda Civics. It seems as though every person in Vientiane must have purchased a new vehicle in the last couple of years. And of course with more cars come new problems. According to The Vientiane Times, the country’s premier English-language newspaper, the recently skyrocketing number of first-time vehicle buyers has lead to a corresponding increase in traffic accidents, as many proud new car owners learn the intricacies of driving simply by trial and error. The other problem the paper cited was with accidents involving drunk drivers. The people of Laos by and large are big drinkers, and, again according to the paper, many who until recently would pedal a bicycle home after tying one on at the local beer joint, now get behind the wheel of their new car and pull away from the curb completely blotto.

A colonial relic sits uninhabited in downtown Savanakhet

Not that Vientiane has morphed into an unappealing place. It’s just that the city is barely recognizable from its prior self. However, there’s still a decidedly French vibe as before, with crusty fresh-baked baguettes stacked in shop windows all over town, scores of French bakeries stocked with tantalizing arrays of flaky pastries, and the names on street signs still written in French underneath their Lao spellings. A few pockets of colonial architecture remain scattered around town as well, like the National Museum, housed in a mouldering old 1925 French administrative building with creaky wood floors and pealing paint that housed several successive Laos governments over the years and once served as the Prime Minister’s office. Until fairly recently it was called the Laos Revolutionary Museum. The exhibits and photographs inside carry outdated captions filled with Cold War-era vitriol towards the United Sates, with references to “the U.S. Imperialists and their puppet soldiers from Saigon,” and my personal favorite, “the American aggressors and their stooge fighters.” In a stroke of brilliant though presumably unintended irony, a sparkling new Swensen’s Ice Cream Parlor sits directly across the street from the museum, its signature Tiffany Lamp-lighted interior and laminated menus festooned with American flags.

Witnessing firsthand the incredible metamorphosis of Vientiane since our last visit left me thinking about the old Robert Frost line, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” And just as this nugget of wisdom captured the fleeting innocence of Pony Boy’s heart in The Outsiders, so too does it ring true in the case of Vientiane’s soul. After all, no matter how romantic and atmospheric a place like Vientiane may have once been, the reality is that such a nostalgic state of being is ephemeral and unsustainable. One of three things inevitably occurs: it slowly dies and disappears altogether; it becomes ossified and preserved in its current state, like a museum piece or a human organ in a jar of formaldehyde, put out on display but no longer functioning; or it grows and changes into something entirely new and different. But either way, the end result is the same—that it’s no longer what it once was. So with this in mind, we feel very fortunate to have seen the old Vientiane before it evolved almost beyond recognition.

A row of decaying old shophouses a block from the Mekong in Savanakhet.

Our next stop in Laos was Savanakhet, a once semi-important French trading town approximately 250 miles south of Vientiane on the eastern banks of the Mekong. Back home a roadtrip of this distance would take four or five hours. But outside of the capital, Laos has yet to develop as rapidly, and traveling by road is very slow. Regardless, we shunned the idea of purchasing expensive tickets for the plush air-conditioned VIP bus filled with package tourists, opting instead for thrift and indigenous flavor aboard the local bus. And boy, did it deliver as promised.

We arrived at Vientiane’s bus station around 9:30 in the morning, bought our tickets and were steered to a sagging old jalopy parked a few feet away. Climbing up the steps I was pleased to note that the bus was only about half full, despite the fact that getting to our seats required crawling over a greasy motorcycle parked in the middle of the aisle. Perhaps a half mile away from the bus station we pulled over on the side of a dusty street where a group of men sat waiting next to a parked pickup truck. As we peered out the window the men hoisted a dozen or more bulging styrofoam crates of fresh fish packed on ice that were held together with packing tape up onto the rooftop rack, managing to spill several gallons of wreaking fish water down the side of the bus in the process. When the men had finished their sweaty task, one of them ran over with a soapy sponge and haphazardly wiped off the streaked windows. For the next several hours we bounced and bucked along the incredibly rough pavement of the highway, stopping every few miles to pick up another passenger waving on the side of the road. As the sun warmed up the morning air, the ice in the crates on the roof began to melt so that every time the bus went around a curve buckets of fishy water sloshed out of the crates and dribbled down the sides of the bus in little rivulets before being whisked inside the open windows, several times directly into the face of an unsuspecting passenger.

By this time every seat on the bus was full, but we continued stopping for more passengers and cargo. At one dusty little crossroads town the driver pulled over and the muscular conductor spent the next ten minutes lugging hundred-pound gunny sacks of rice from a waiting farm truck onto the bus, stacking them two and three high in the middle aisle. Still sloshing gallons of fish water left and right, the bus lumbered on, as dust from the unpaved road blew in through the windows in torrents that felt like a sandblast to the face. Roughly three hours short of Savanahket we stopped at a local bus station where a group of a dozen or more Vietnamese men, all wearing matching green pith helmets, got on board. With no seats left, the conductor pulled a stack of plastic stools out from under a pile of luggage in the rear of the bus and handed them out to the men. The rest of the way to Savanakhet I rode with a Vietnamese man sitting beside me on a stool in the aisle, another sitting on the seat of the motorcycle parked one row up, and a Vietnamese teenager sitting above me on three gunny sacks of rice stacked atop one another next to my seat. It was a very long eleven hours, but there was rarely a dull moment.

Unlike Vientiane, Savanakhet has yet to experience the effects of progress and development. A small provincial city of maybe 60,000 inhabitants, it naps in a dusty slumber, presumably as it has for decades since its glory days in the early 20th Century as a shipping outpost along the Mekong River. It’s a rather strange place, with a few old historic streets running parallel to the river lined by crumbling colonial buildings in varying states of dereliction or outright abandonment, and across the main road through town another handful of grid-like streets filled with homely 1970s concrete buildings.

Julianna pedals past Savanakhet's abandoned soccer stadium along the banks of the Mekong.

Every place we visited in Laos on past trips, from the capital city to the tiniest jungle village up in the north of the country, exuded the same laid back, tropical vibe of languid merriment, but something about Savanakhet was slightly ghostly and melancholic, much like a dusty windblown town slowly withering away out on the plains of West Texas. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Savanakhet, like many of those lonely West Texas towns, sits on an arid expanse of flat barren land, devoid of the cheerful greenery one normally expects in Southeast Asia, but regardless, it felt unlike any place we’ve been in Laos. Like the desolate setting of a Larry McMurtry novel, Savanahket even had an old circa-1950s single-screen movie theater set in a row of tumbledown storefronts a block away from the river, with faded movie posters inside glass marquee cases outside the chained-up doorway. Despite the five o’clock and seven o’clock showtimes that appeared to be recently painted on the window, we never saw it open for business.

After three days in Savanakhet we decided to head south to Pakse, another old French colonial relic about five hours south by bus. Situated on a peninsula at the confluence of the mighty Mekong and the much smaller Se Don River, Pakse embodies everything we’ve come to love about Laos: a lusty, tropical setting along the banana-palm lined banks of the chocolate-brown Mekong, a smattering of crusty old colonial buildings with drying laundry fluttering on upstairs balcony railings, and that indescribable joie de vivre that the smiling people of Laos so effortlessly embody. Like other such places, there’s really nothing to do in Pakse but soak up the ambiance, explore the outlying villages and countryside on a rented motorbike, and sip numerous bottles of ice-cold Beerlao in the evenings just as the locals do. Actually, many of the townfolk appear to be in the habit of cracking open a beer well before lunch time, but we always waited until the motorbike was parked for the evening, at which time we inevitably found ourselves lounging at a little bamboo-thatched bar built on stilts over the river, gazing into another dreamy pink sunset.

Another ice-cold Beerlao at a typical Laos beer joint

Speaking of beer, a word about Beerlao seems in order here. Unlike most countries where multiple brands of domestic and foreign suds are widely available, in Laos Beerlao is beer. Outside of a few upscale places—primarily in Vientiane—that sell Heineken and other imports, pretty much everywhere else beer means Beerlao, the devilishly tasty product of Laos’ nationalized brewery. And like the beverage itself, the ubiquity of Beerlao paraphernalia all over Laos is astonishing. Almost without exception every single restaurant and bar—not to mention most stores and shops—are decorated inside and out with yellow and green Beerlao illuminated signs, Beerlao beach umbrellas, tablecloths, calendars, wall clocks, and of course the requisite tower of empty yellow plastic bottle crates stacked outside by the curb. It seems a safe bet to assume that Beerlao is indeed the national drink.

But despite all the millions of gallons of Beerlao flowing freely around the country, it’s actually quite unusual to see people noticeably intoxicated. As opposed to the Puritanical guilty pleasure of binge-drinking fairly common back home, the people of Laos, perhaps like the French with their wine, appear to simply enjoy a cold beer periodically throughout the day. It’s just another part of what makes Laos so special.

Just the other afternoon in Pakse, for example, while riding our rented motorbike down a side street, we passed a modern gas station where the two young attendants sat slurping bowls of noodle soup and enjoying a couple of beers at a card table set up under the awning next to the pumps. Directly across the street a group of teenagers idled around a picnic table under a banyan tree in the front yard of a house, tossing back bottles of Beerlao and singing along to karaoke videos on a nearby television set through a wireless microphone plugged in to a stack of concert speakers that broadcast their high-decibel tone-deaf crooning across the whole neighborhood. Meanwhile, a half-asleep man wearing nothing but boxer shorts stood at the driveway gate next door scratching his head while peeing into the ditch that ran alongside the tarmac as if nothing at all was unusual about the scene.

In spite of the country’s tumultuous and often tragic recent history—or perhaps because of it—the people of Laos seem by and large more concerned with enjoying the good things in life than with dwelling on the bad. Of course it’s no Eden, but it truly is a magical place. In fact, sometimes the whole country feels like a lazy summertime Sunday afternoon.

Getting on a bus in Pakse a few days ago, heading west over the Mekong on our way to the Thai border and back to Bangkok made me think once again about Robert Frost and The Outsiders. And just like Johnny pleading with Pony Boy, I found myself wanting to say, “Stay gold, Laos, stay gold.”